Mobile Payments – For the Online Marketer
Mobile marketing has become an essential strategy for many businesses. As mobile marketing grows and becomes even more mainstream it is  important to understand what consumers are doing so you can design your mobile marketing campaign around your buyers.

Consumers may be most likely to use their mobile phones to check store locations and pricing, but they’re showing an increasing interest in using their phones to make a purchase, says Hung LeHong, research vice president for retail at technology research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.  These are important highlights to understand for your mobile marketing focus

This is significant to online marketers as well.  With promotions for clickbank products and other training materials it is essential to reach your consumers fast.  Based on these studies having a mobile commerce solution for the online marketer will soon be a necessity.

LeHong, during a presentation at this week’s Mobile Commerce Forum in Chicago, noted that purchasing via mobile phones came in at the bottom of a list of things consumers said they were likely to do this fall and next spring with their mobile phones.

Mobile Marketing – How Do They Buy?

The Gartner study found that 17% of U.S. consumers said they were likely to make a purchase from a mobile app or mobile commerce site, and that 16% said they were likely to make an in-store purchase through a mobile phone

Mobile Marketing – What Are Consumers Doing?

These figures compared to 42% of consumers who said they were likely to use their mobile phone to check a store location, 34% who said they would check product prices while in a store, and 31% who said they’d receive promotional messages on their phones.

But though the percentages were smallest for making purchases via mobile phones, those percentages showed the strongest growth over prior surveys, LeHong says.

“Year over year, mobile payments and commerce is the fastest growing,” he says.

Retailers designing mobile sites and apps, he adds, should focus on making sure they support multichannel shopping, such as checking store locations, because that’s something shoppers use their mobile phones for today. But for longer-term planning, he adds, they should also support an easy way to complete a purchase.

Mobile Marketing – Where is the Growth?

The future growth seems to be in geo-targeting.  Mobile marketing that is geo-targeted can really